Dems torn by disparate visions
DES MOINES, Iowa — The race between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, which voters will begin deciding a week from Monday, is not just about the White House anymore. It has intensified into an epochal battle over their vastly different visions for the Democratic Party.
Sanders, a New Dealstyle liberal from Vermont, last week became the party’s first top-tier candidate since the 1980s to propose broad-based tax increases. He argues that only muscular government action — Wall Street regulations, public works jobs, Medicare for all — will topple America’s “rigged” economy.
“Something is grotesquely wrong in America,” he said Thursday in New Hampshire, urging voters to deliver a land-
slide in November that would cow Congress into enacting his agenda.
Clinton, a mainstream Democrat, has started contrasting herself with Sanders by championing a “sensible, achievable agenda” and promising to build on President Barack Obama’s legacy in health care, the economy and national security. She is the classic continuity candidate: seeking support from blacks, Hispanics, women, union members and suburban voters, and proposing policies that are friendly to families and businesses — strategies that have defined the party since President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992.
“The middle class needs income, not tax increases,” Hillary Clinton said Thursday in Iowa.
The question of whether Sanders can turn the liberal wing of the party into a true force again in presidential politics will have its first test in the Iowa caucuses next Monday. He has driven Clinton into a tight race here, according to polls, and he has a lead among likely voters in the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary.
While Clinton has many institutional advantages, Sanders has electrified huge numbers of young people — the party’s future — with his critique of Democratic support for free-market capitalism and interventionist foreign policy. He appears determined to steer the party to the left, even though he is not a registered Democrat but rather an independent and a self-described democratic socialist.
But many Democrats are torn about whether his liberalism, or Clinton’s pragmatism, will be enough to win a general election.
“The early enthusiasm for Sanders reminds me of the McGovern and Mondale races, where two good men were only able to win one state each in their presidential campaigns,” said John Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, referring to liberalism’s wipeouts behind George McGovern in 1972 and Walter F. Mondale in 1984. “Democratic voters don’t want that to happen again.”
But Democrats also have harbored reservations about the party’s incremental approach to government since the 1990s. Bill Clinton may have led the party away from liberalism, but many voters never lost a taste for it, said Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator and governor of Nebraska.
“Prosperity made it easier to do,” Kerrey said about the party’s acceptance of Bill Clinton’s economic and deregulatory policies. However, he added: “The freemarket approach to solving problems was discredited by the Great Recession. Liberalism is now seen as a remedy to excessive reliance on the market.”
The two futures for the Democratic Party are not only about ideology. The candidates have political strategy in mind, too, against the 2016 Republican nominee.
Sanders’ ideas and intensity could energize the party’s base and, he believes, inspire a tidal wave of support from young people, ensuring a level of voter turnout that would favor the Democratic nominee. (Low turnout in 2014 helped Republicans in House and Senate races, he notes.)
Yet Sanders risks easy caricature from Republicans as a tax-and-spend liberal who would turn the United States into a Scandinavian-style welfare state. And that could also hurt him with moderate Democrats.
“Sanders’ ideas are deeply felt, but at the same time he has really overreached,” said Drew Westen, a message consultant for congressional Democrats. “The average American is not going to buy into a vision of the federal government running one big health care program. Many people are actually afraid of that idea.”
Hillary Clinton, by embracing many of the policies of Obama and her husband, is aiming to rebuild the same coalitions that elected them, and hoping that the prospect of the first female president will draw even more women to the Democratic side this time. While Sanders would have to defend his far-left plans, Clinton believes the Republican nominee, whoever that may be, will face the challenge of defending radically conservative ideas.
But Clinton’s vision for the Democratic Party also comes with vulnerabilities: Many young people and liberals, and some women, believe her views are too moderate, and they do not trust her to fight for typical Americans. And Republicans will easily rally their voters if Clinton, whom they have long demonized, becomes the Democratic standard-bearer.